Domain authority, often shortened to DA, is a metric that estimates how strong and trustworthy a website is compared with other domains. The value usually sits between 1 and 100.
The higher the domain authority, the better the chances of ranking well with your content.
How is domain authority calculated?
Domain authority is not an official Google metric. It was developed by SEO tools such as Moz and is based on various factors that influence how strong a domain is.
Among them:
- the number of backlinks
- the quality of the linking websites
- the trust and authority of the domain
- the age of the website
- the strength of internal linking
- visibility in search engines
A site with many high quality links from strong domains usually has a higher domain authority than a new or weak one.
Why domain authority matters
It helps you compare websites and get a sense of the competition.
In SEO, a strong domain often means new content ranks faster and less effort is needed to build visibility.
The number should only ever serve as a rough comparison, though. What decides things in the end are real rankings, traffic and conversions, not a single SEO metric.